McCabe Bought a $70,000 Table, Then the FBI Redacted Docs To Keep It Secret

In a corrupt FBI, the cover-ups even include the conference room props.

That was the not-so-veiled message from Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley this week as he published a pointed letter to embattled Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein demanding greater cooperation with lawmakers from the country’s top law enforcement agencies.

And that $70,000 conference room table was just the beginning.

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In the letter dated May 23, Grassley criticized the FBI’s extensive redactions of details in text messages between FBI Special Agent Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, the now-former FBI lawyer who was McCabe’s legal counsel.

The material redacted — “covered-up” in a very literal sense — included the fact that McCabe had spent $70,000 of taxpayer money on a table for his conference room.

“As one example of redacted material, in a text message produced to the Committee, the price of Andrew McCabe’s $70,000 conference table was redacted,” Grassley wrote. “In another, an official’s name was redacted in reference to a text about the Obama White House ‘running’ an investigation, although it is unclear to which investigation they were referring.”

The revelation of apparent White House involvement in an investigation of the Donald Trump presidential campaign has been shamefully ignored by the mainstream media (though conservative news outlets have managed to get the news to the American public).

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That’s infuriating, but not surprising. The mainstream media has a vested interest in skewing the public’s perception of the “Trump collusion” probe and protecting former President Barack Obama’s legacy.

But the $70,000 table? As The Daily Caller pointed out on Friday, the same media outlets that have trumpeted stories about spending by Trump administration officials have been suspiciously quiet about McCabe’s willingness to spend more than twice the average annual American income on furniture for his conference room.

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And when it was mentioned, it got treated like a throwaway story. Here’s how The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler passed along a tweet from the Federalist co-founder Sean Davis breaking the story:

LOL? The Washington Post’s coverage of EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt paints his purchase of a $43,000 secure phone booth as a crime, but the newspaper’s alleged “fact checker” literally considers an FBI bureaucrat spending $70,000 on a table to be a joke. (The Federalist, on the other hand, gave it the serious attention it deserved.)

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Obviously, the FBI knew that an abuse of taxpayer money like that was no joke, or it would not have tried to keep the price tag hidden from Congress — the branch of government that’s supposed to provide oversight of executive branch agencies.

And that was the point that Grassley’s letter was making in demanding more cooperation from the men and women who are supposed to be enforcing the laws of the United States.

After the Obama administration’s eight years of corrupting American institutions like the Justice Department and the FBI with its politicization of law enforcement, and the shameful eight years the American media spent as the willing handmaiden of an essentially autocratic presidency, American voters are fully justified in not trusting organizations that should be bulwarks of protecting American freedoms.

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When the FBI stoops to covering up the expense of a piece of conference room furniture in the name of national security, it raises the question of what much more serious breaches of trust the bureau might be hiding.

And when the supposedly “free press” acts as its accomplice by covering up the news from the American people, it raises the question of what else the media knows but is refusing to pass on to its viewers and readers.

Combined, it all just goes to show the depth and murk of the swamp Trump supporters elected him to drain.

Largely a product of Catholic schools, who discovered Ayn Rand in college, Joe is a lifelong newspaperman who learned enough about the trade over 30 years to be skeptical of every word ever written. He was also lucky enough to have a job that didn't need a printing press to do it.